


if he were not parched

by catacombs



Category: Original Work
Genre: Breathplay, Dubious Consent, Kinda, Other, Rituals, Tentacles, Water Spirit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-29
Updated: 2018-08-29
Packaged: 2019-07-04 07:13:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15836355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catacombs/pseuds/catacombs
Summary: A lost nomad stumbles upon an oasis.





	if he were not parched

**Author's Note:**

> Originally a smut swap prompt, I think, but not even for this year. I'd feel weird gifting it so late if I could even remember who it was for.

Ohrn, the nomad's pack mule, had collapsed several hours ago. His sides heaved as he lay on the hot sand, unable to regain his feet. The nomad's tent would have been too cumbersome for him to carry far, so he had set it up where Ohrn had fallen to give him some respite in his last hours.

Ohrn had been a constant companion, and the nomad missed the sturdy nudge of the mule's nose already, the familiar huff of his breathing as he'd ambled alongside him across the furnace of the Safirhan desert. He would like to have wept, but he could not spare a drop of moisture. 

Still, his heart lay heavy at the loss, and his shoulders bore the weight of his saddle bags with equal, if slightly more resentful, sorrow. But he had spent too long traveling to Kavrhan and endured too much insult from the city dwellers' idea of haggling to abandon his spoils along the way. He knew they thought him unrefined, with his dust-stained robes and hair in a simple knot -- worse even than the caravan drivers -- and they always tried to cozen him. He thought of them with a merry contempt that spurred him onwards.

If he were to make it back to his people, it would not be empty handed. And if he were to die here, driven off the well-worn trade road by a battering dust-storm and deprived of the essential caravanserai, then let whoever might stumble across his bleached bones find reward in the stoppered vials of colored ink and the rolls of vellum as much as his meager coin purse.

It seemed a bitter irony. Here he was, lost, and it had been maps that he had traded in exchange for the materials -- to make yet more maps, as was his livelihood. The people he had sold them to did not know their value. He knew they would only frame them and hang them on the walls of their dim homes, to appear worldly and cultured. They would never go anywhere.

He trudged onward, captive under the sun's titanic glare, sand sliding beneath his sandals as he climbed another featureless dune. His throat was raw and dry, his waterskin long empty. He had stopped sweating some time ago. Dehydration made him dizzy and nauseous. If he could weather until nightfall, then he could reorient himself by the stars. Until then, he would seek water and shade and pray that the Scales should tip in his favor.

The wind skimmed the sand from the dune and cast the stinging grains at him like a spiteful child. He cursed its spirit and pulled his scarf more tightly around his face to protect his skin.

The stories said that this desert was formed in a battle between the huntress of the forests, Dohevra, and the serpent-queen Safirha, who coveted her lands. Safirha's fiery breath had razed the immense forests that once grew here, and the flames were so fierce that the ash had crystallized and settled into the undulating dunes of the Safirhan desert. That was why the sand stung so.

On her defeat, Safirha's many tails became a river delta, though it flowed many days travel from here. Dohevra had wept for the loss of her forests. Where her tears struck, an oasis flourished, imbued with her ancient magicks. 

The nomad grew ever thirstier to think on it. He would blaspheme terribly enough to make Dohevra weep all over again if it meant he could drink just one of her tears. 

And perhaps it was this wishful thinking that meant the nomad spied one of her oases as he crested another mighty dune. It shimmered on the horizon, and though he couldn't be sure that what he saw was real, it invigorated him. He forged onward, his spirits lifting with a dangerous hope. 

The Great Balance weighed generously today -- it was not a mirage!

The palms rose lush and verdant against the bright intensity of the sky, and in time he drew close enough that he could perceive the individual fronds, and the dates that hung heavy and ripe beneath them. His mouth would water if he were not as parched as dust, and his stomach protested that his legs could not carry him any faster.

The sun was hitting its blazing peak as he passed into the shade of the oasis, and the nomad found a moment of grace in its cool relief. He cast down his saddle bags and sank to his knees in the green shadows. The scrubby grass prickled between his fingers as he gathered overripe dates that had fallen to the ground. He scooped them hastily to his mouth, mindless of the grit that stuck to their sweet, fermenting skins. He spat the stones into the earth and then crawled to the water's edge.

The water reflected the sky like a mirror, a pristine blue that he broke with his face. He pushed his headscarf down around his neck and drank deep, quenching his desperate thirst -- and then drew back in horror, ripples spreading as water dripped from the fringe of his scarf and loose tendrils of his hair. A deep foreboding overcame him. He had not recited the ritual words, to ask permission of the spirit that guarded sacred places such as this.

Blasphemy indeed. What a fool he was, to have survived a desiccated fate only to condemn himself here, forgetting the words that he must have spoken ten score times and more.

"Forgive me," he said, his voice cracking with dryness and with fear. "Please, oh --" He bent his head and brought his fingertips to the stilled water. The surface tension clung to his skin, and he chanted the words he had been taught as soon as he had been old enough to speak. The supplication rolled off his tongue with rote-worn familiarity.

He knew in his heart that it was too late; the spirit of the oasis would have been instantly displeased at his trespass. He could only pray that it was dormant, in too deep a slumber to rise from the aquifer below.

The nomad's words to the spirit came to their end, and he decided that he may as well ease his physical discomfort while he awaited its judgment. If he were to soon meet the Gods, he would be cleansed and at peace. 

He unknotted his headscarf and submerged it, grains of sand floating out of the folds and sinking to the silty lakebed. He rinsed his tunic similarly, and his smallclothes, and left them spread out to dry. He would soak them again to prolong his respite from the heat before he moved on -- if he ever did.

The water of the oasis was shallow at the bank, lapping around his calves. He waded in further, the blissful cool waters rising over his thighs, his stomach, up to his armpits and finally kissing his chin. 

He flexed his feet, and wet sand oozed between his toes. The sun reflected from the surface of the water brilliantly as he bathed. He closed his eyes and sighed. This was a rare treat. It was considered disrespectful to submerge oneself in the caravanserai oases like this, unless you were a child. 

He let himself float. His hair unraveled from its knot, billowing around his face. The sun beat down on his bare skin, marbling his body with bright caustics. 

Suddenly he rocked as though caught in turbulence, and a great shadow fell over him. He flailed, opening his eyes to see that the oasis had surged up around him like a tidal wave and, before he could take a breath to scream, it thundered down upon him, casting him under the water.

* * *

The sun was setting when he came around, laying a red heat over the bedraggled mess of him and the sandy bank he was sprawled upon. His clothes and bags were nowhere to be found. Perhaps he had been swept to the other side of the oasis. His blood shook his heart -- the spirit must have awakened and thrown him from its waters. 

He was not naive enough to think that this would be the extent of its wrath. He looked out over the water, dyed sanguine under the westering sun, and his fear was confirmed. A being rose from the surface, a shapeless, elemental creature. The sun refracted through it as it sought a form: an alligator; a vulture; a snake; then Safirha herself, with her many tails.

Once, when he had been younger, the nomad had traveled for months to the edge of the world and stood at the lip of the ocean. Its vastness had awakened a primal fear in him -- the emptiness of water was so different from the emptiness of sand, so profoundly unknowable. He had turned his back on the crashing waves and fled back inland. 

Now the oasis spirit spoke to him, and its voice was like the immense rumble of the ocean's currents. It stirred fear on top of fear, though he did not understand its tongue at all.

It coursed across the water and onto the bank, leaving white froth in its wake as it swirled through itself. It moved with a liquid suppleness beyond the means of a mortal creature, and the nomad frantically scurried away -- to no avail. The spirit whipped a watery tendril around his ankle and dragged him back towards it. Sand abraded his naked rear, and he shouted a curse in his alarm.

The spirit made a noise he recognised, muted and light, like the time he'd held a scrimshawed seashell to his ear. Laughter. The tendril of water made its way from his ankle up his leg, flowing over the lean muscle of his inner thigh. He felt the pull of a tide in his stomach -- the water he'd drunk earlier, seeking to rejoin the whole.

The sensation made him grow firm between his legs. His terror was fathoms deep.

The swell and gush of the spirit's language resolved into something on the edge of his comprehension. Why resist, it seemed to say, when it was already inside of him? 

What was a drop or two more? There was still debt to be repaid.

The nomad closed his eyes; his heart thundered in his throat. Cool pressure parted his legs and trickled into his groin, enveloping his hardening cock. He thrust his hips into it without thought, and his mouth fell open in a gasp.

As though it were an invitation, the spirit sent a pillar of glittering water arcing into the sky and then plunging down his throat. 

The nomad's gasp became a gurgle, sputtering and coughing that did nothing to dislodge the creature's… its _tentacle_ , held in rigid tension by its magicks. It only wriggled itself in deeper, dripping slick rivulets over his chin as it stroked across his tongue. He tried to clench his teeth, but he couldn't do so for long -- it only flowed between them instead, and the force of its passage pushed his mouth open again.

He could drown here on dry land, if the spirit willed it.

Soon his lungs felt as though they might burst and his jaw was beginning to ache where the gushing water kept his mouth pressed wide. His cock twitched as he swallowed and swallowed, his throat working as he tried to breathe, fighting the black spots that gathered at the edge of his vision. The spirit must have taken pity on him, for the tentacle abruptly collapsed, pouring down his throat and soaking him entirely. Again, that distant-sea laughter.

His stomach sloshed when he coughed, and while he recovered, his head spinning with the sweet resurgence of air, the spirit coiled its eddying form around him. It molded itself to suit the jut of his bones, the angles of his trembling limbs. 

From its pellucid skin a host of tendrils emerged, luminous in the last rays of the sun. The nomad's breath stuttered in his throat as they converged upon him in a tumultuous, translucent weave.

They spread tributaries across his body. Over his hips they ran, across his nipples, around his neck and through his hair, making it stream about his face in black ribbons. A liquid tentacle encircled his balls and tugged at them, and he cried out at the peculiar sensation, the pressure and the give. His fear sank and rose in waves as the spirit smothered him, its undulations kneading him into submission. Any hope of escape he'd harbored evaporated under the deluge of its embrace.

The nomad found he could arch his back with abandon, and did so.

The spirit sang its appreciation, a bubbling fount of desire that rang as clear as a bell in the nomad's mind. It sent an unexpected rush of pride through him, to think that he had pleased this ancient creature. Perhaps that was why he didn't resist as it lowered him down, turned his face to the sand and mounted him.

Its song reverberated in his chest, rare and magical like the patter of rain. Its watery tendrils held him fast, and the nomad felt a stinging jet of warm water strike his buttock. He gasped, and the spirit sent a tendril meandering between his legs; his knees slid in the wet sand and brought his legs wider. Again, a spurt of water, but this time direct against his hole -- a firm, persistent burst that he opened for and took inside of him, and that tore a great moan from his chest. His cock, swinging heavy beneath him, pulsed with arousal.

The spirit bore down on him until it was gushing inside him fully, faster, thickening into a flowing column that filled the nomad to the brim. Rivulets cascaded down his thighs as it rocked him forward into the sand. His hair hung limp and surly on his wet shoulders and swung into his face with each thrust.

The last light of dusk faded, and the spirit became full of stars. 

The spirit's enveloping form was a balm against the desert night's chill. The parts of him that were not surrounded by it grew cold -- his fingers, his knees, the tip of his nose -- and the nomad sought to be encompassed more fully in the spirit's divine heat. He pushed back against its forceful rhythm, plunging himself inside the creature just as the creature plunged into him. 

It sang its pleasure, a reverberation that spread over every part of his body. O, drown me, he thought, as his head went under, his tongue thick with salt. I will die for you gladly. His climax rilled through him, shining surface fragments of light, and the spirit burst like a soap bubble.

* * *

The nomad woke at the first blazing lick of sun across the back of his thighs. His throat was parched and his skin felt tight; there was a sheen of salt on his arm when he licked it. 

With anguish he realized he had not read the stars last night -- so enrapt with fear and passion, perhaps he had not expected to see the morning. 

All that drinking, and still he thirsted.

He took a slow walk around the perimeter of the oasis; its surface was as sheer as glass and as blue as the sky. His clothing had been tossed into the sparse undergrowth; he retrieved it from an oleander bush and pulled it on. It was crisp and full of sand.

He shook out his headscarf and approached the water and knelt in petition to say the sacred words. Each syllable dropped from his lips like water. He wet his scarf and used it to bind up his hair and once the ripples stilled, his reflection stared back at him from its pristine surface.

And then it shifted and scattered, and reached up to him. The nomad closed his eyes, and the water kissed him. Look, look, it seemed to say, and so he did. The oasis' waters grew dark, and darker still, and then lit with a firmament of sparkling stars, here in the day. Mur burned brightest of all, the midnight lantern, his beacon home.

His eyes grew wet with gratitude, and the mirage faded. His tears struck the water and he felt the spirit resound in him; he carried this blessing with him to the west, in the cool damp weave of his headscarf that somehow the sun could not touch.


End file.
